As we prepare to celebrate the most important event in the history of humankind, I believe that nothing is more fitting than a reflection on the meaning of some of the most moving icons in the history of Christian sacred art. The painting by Duccio di Buoninsegna (1299–1319), The Nativity with the Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel (1308), is a true visual synthesis of this venerable iconographic tradition, well represented both in the Byzantine tradition and in that of the Western Middle Ages. I look forward to your comments.
Merry Christmas to all of you!
No event in the history of humankind can be understood without a careful reflection on the consequences of that deed which took place at the very beginnings of history: original sin and the fall of our first parents, Adam and Eve. As a result of that unfortunate event, all authentic prophecies—first and foremost those found in the sacred texts of the Old Testament, and later those of pagan visionaries from various cultures and traditions—speak, directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly, of the coming of the Divine Savior. Restless and troubled by metaphysical anxieties, some of the ancient sages sought solutions to the disastrous condition of humanity. The Athenian Plato, the disciple of Socrates, has left us as a legacy one of the most profound descriptions of the state of fallen humanity.
Many of Plato’s dialogues—Phaedo, Politeia, Phaedrus, and others—speak of the human condition through metaphors that have entered the heritage of universal culture. Who has not heard of the allegory of the cave? I hasten, however, to point out that it is not the only symbolic description of the human condition. Other Platonic parables, equally significant though far less well known, cast revealing light upon our present state. I shall write about all these matters very soon. Their essence, illuminated from different angles by the author’s literary genius, is always the same.
Enveloped in the penumbras of a twilight world, in which being and nothingness are mysteriously intermingled, we wander through the labyrinth created by our own illusions and self-deceptions, stirred up by the temptations of “that old serpent, who is called the devil and Satan, who deceiveth the whole world” (Revelation 12:9). Instead of prolonging and amplifying a dream that often turns into a nightmare, Plato proposes the only perfectly logical solution for the one who knows: the exit from the dark labyrinth. In one way or another, this is what all the lovers of Wisdom in the past have proposed. Yet God, the Almighty Creator, has prepared and fulfilled a solution that surpasses everything the ancient sages could have imagined.
The Incarnation and Birth of the second Person of the Holy Trinity, God the Son, Jesus Christ, defy human logic, just as do His death on the Cross and His glorious Resurrection. Truly divine, the solution offered to us by the incarnate Logos brings to perfection, in an unimaginable way, the wisdom of Plato and of all the ancient thinkers he represents. What follows is a true Christmas story. Though somewhat philosophical, it is no less dramatic and, at the same time, filled with the eternal light of imperishable Wisdom.
The Cave of Master Duccio and Plato’s Wisdom
The painting of the Italian master Duccio di Buoninsegna (1299–1319) represents a true synthesis of an iconographic tradition found both in the Christian East and in the Western world. The main image accompanying my article depicts the birth of the Savior Jesus Christ, who is visible at the center of the painting, within a dark cave. It is precisely this cave that may serve as a focal point rich in symbolic meaning, in the direction opened by Plato’s famous parable.
Presented in Book VII of the dialogue Politeia (usually mistranslated as The Republic), the Platonic text describes the human condition in a figurative manner. As is to be expected for a subject of such importance, the one who leads the discussion and responds to the questions of the interlocutors is Socrates. Let’s listen to him:
“Picture men dwelling in a sort of subterranean cavern with a long entrance open to the light on its entire width. Conceive them as having their legs and necks fettered from childhood, so that they remain in the same spot, able to look forward only, and prevented by the fetters from turning their heads. Picture further the light from a fire burning higher up and at a distance behind them, and between the fire and the prisoners and above them a road along which a low wall has been built, as the exhibitors of puppet-shows have partitions before the men themselves, above which they show the puppets.”
“All that I see,” he said.
“See also, then, men carrying past the wall implements of all kinds that rise above the wall, and human images and shapes of animals as well, wrought in stone and wood and every material, some of these bearers presumably speaking and others silent.”
“A strange image you speak of,” he said, “and strange prisoners.”
“Like to us,” I said; “for, to begin with, tell me do you think that these men would have seen anything of themselves or of one another except the shadows cast from the fire on the wall of the cave that fronted them?”
“How could they,” he said, “if they were compelled to hold their heads unmoved through life?”
“And again, would not the same be true of the objects carried past them?”
“Surely.”
“If then they were able to talk to one another, do you not think that they would suppose that in naming the things that they saw1 they were naming the passing objects?”
“Necessarily.”
“And if their prison had an echo from the wall opposite them, when one of the passersby uttered a sound, do you think that they would suppose anything else than the passing shadow to be the speaker?”
“By Zeus, I do not,” said he.
“Then in every way such prisoners would deem reality to be nothing else than the shadows of the artificial objects.”
“Quite inevitably,” he said1
Although belonging to the pre-Christian pagan world, the dialogue proves how right, among others, Saints Justin Martyr and Philosopher and Clement of Alexandria were: before the coming of Christ the Savior, even the sages of the pagan world, discreetly guided by Holy Providence, spoke of the mysteries of eternal life. This explains why we find their figures painted on the walls of numerous churches in both the Eastern and Western Christian worlds.
In the text cited above we find an extraordinary description of the state of fallen humanity. Although we do not encounter in the Platonic dialogues anything equivalent to “original sin,” we nevertheless find an astonishing understanding of its consequences. Here is how these are presented through the allegory of the cave.
The first point concerns our condition, that of the descendants of Adam and Eve. The chains that hold our necks and heads immobile, incapable of turning toward “the world of the unseen,” are symbols of that ignorance resulting from the mutation of the cognitive faculty that occurred as a consequence of original sin. We have been blinded. We have been blinded because we lost the graces that produced in the human soul the infused knowledge possessed by Adam and Eve in the beginning. Although this was not yet the beatific vision, what they were nevertheless able to know—through a grace endowed with exceptional epistemological virtues, bestowed by God Himself—far surpasses anything we could imagine. After the Fall we find ourselves chained in the darkness of ignorance that results from the incapacity to contemplate by means of an intellect illumined by grace. Dominated by rational (i.e., discursive) knowledge, in which the correct syllogism is the highest achievement to which we can aspire, and likewise by empirical-sensory knowledge, we are incapable of directly seeing the world of God, of the angels, and of His saints.
Ignorance, however, is not everything. If every person could instantly recognize this wretched condition, that in itself would already be something. For then one would not be deceived by the inferior knowledge we now possess. Our gravest present problem is that it seems to us that what we know through our senses is everything—and that whatever is known in this way is the only reality"—when in fact, as Plato says, it is something merely ephemeral and illusory. The Christian Revelation tells us even more: everything we now know is destined for destruction. The world, as we now see it, will have an end—by fire. Only after that will the righteous of God have access to a “new heaven and a new earth,” knowing— as Saint Paul the Apostle says—“face to face.” Yet now, without careful reflection, we come to regard as true and real what is in fact only a mixture of being and non-being, or, in the revealed terms of Holy Scripture, of good and evil.
According to Plato, the exceptional function of “the one-who-knows,” the lover of wisdom, is to help others emerge from this state of ignorance. This, for him, is philo-sophia (that is, “the love of wisdom”). An exponent of ancient sapiential traditions whose origin must be sought in the Adamic knowledge of the beginnings, the Athenian thinker is a spiritual guide akin to Pythagoras, Socrates, or Patañjali. Each of them preached, within the context of his own culture, an escape from the fallen world through a life of asceticism and contemplation, meant to help those who followed it attain Wisdom. Nevertheless, the failure to achieve immortality was evident to all, for all pagan sages died without rising again. The exit from the cave was no more than an intermittent dream.
Prisoners of Nothingness
But what, after all, is the cave of the prisoners described by Plato? It is a world of dark shadows, considered—because of metaphysical ignorance—the sole reality by those held captive. Having never had the chance to see Paradise, it is easy to come to deny its existence. Lacking access to the Kingdom of Heaven, fallen humanity came to believe that what surrounds us is all that exists. One of the great thinkers who denounced this illusion was the supreme genius of Christian metaphysics: Saint Athanasius (c. 296–373).
The great Alexandrian Doctor described the slide of fallen humanity down the slope toward nothingness: created from nothing, after rejecting—in Adam and Eve—the holy command of the Creator (“of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat”), we roll back toward the nothingness from which we were created. Corrupted, human nature came to resemble a parched land entirely devoid of water. Deep fissures furrow it, fragmenting it. The original harmony was replaced by a chaotic state of continuous warfare. The murder of Abel by his brother Cain inaugurates the long chain of hatred. In place of the blessed light of grace, which transformed original nature into a fertile garden, the darkness of nothingness reveals itself through the gaping voids that open within fallen nature.
If we were to adopt the favored metaphor of another Holy Father, Gregory of Nyssa, human nature—like a vessel created to receive within its emptiness the luminous content of grace—received, through the deception of the devil, the lead (or mud) of what Saint Athanasius called “corruption.” In effect, both humanity and the cosmos entered, under the influence of this corruption, a true process of entropy and dissolution, which only God the Savior can interrupt. This is why no sage before Christ the Savior was able to resolve the tragedy of the human condition. If God were not to intervene, humanity would destroy itself through the generalization and the institutionalization of sin.
The darkness over which we are suspended, the void in which we are enclosed, is—in Plato’s terms—the “cave” into which our own disobedience has imprisoned us. Love for God, the supreme and absolute Being, has been replaced by love for nothingness—delivered to us in the form of the illusions and lies in which we live wrapped without realizing it. It is as if, instead of loving her bridegroom who gives her the most beautiful engagement ring imaginable, the bride loves the ring, forgetting and completely ignoring the one who offered it to her. Idolatry was and is nothing other than another form of this pseudo-metaphysical illusion: instead of worshiping the Creator, people worship creatures—or, in more recent versions, worship themselves egocentrically and egomaniacally. Solitary and often persecuted, sages such as Socrates strove to convince their contemporaries that the true world, the true life, lies elsewhere. Yet their failure showed that the mission they were trying to accomplish surpassed them.
The Astonishing Divine Hidden Plan
God knew all these things perfectly—and He also knew the solution, absolutely inconceivable to us: the ontological inconsistency of our world, which was like a strip of celluloid disintegrating under the smoldering fire beneath its illusory surface, can be overcome only by the One who knows the secret of secrets: the power of that light which Tolkien called “the Imperishable Flame”—the sanctifying grace that Adam and Eve lost, deceived by the devil, in Paradise. This grace cannot be obtained by any mechanism, by any act, or by any form of physic violence; only God can bestow it upon those who become His friends.
Therefore, this grace can be received only through a heart-to-heart dialogue between persons: the humble human being face to face with the three Persons of the Holy Trinity. Alas! What distance separates the fallen creature from the Creator—not a thousand, a million, or a billion light-years, but an infinite distance. Precisely for this reason, to show us that He wishes to be near us, God did the most unexpected thing: He came, like a sphere of super-natural fire, into the midst of our darkness. He, the Sun of the eternal kingdom, descended into the cave in which we are captive. This divine miracle is precisely what traditional Christian icons present to us.
But what do we see in them? An incandescent point in the deep darkness of the fallen world. This is the divine Child Himself, Jesus of Nazareth, born of Mary, the wife of Joseph. The heavenly hierarchies, represented by the angels gazing in amazement upon the newborn Child, are shaken. The Holy Virgin herself is shaken. In many Byzantine icons, the Queen of Heaven and Earth, with a face overshadowed by deep wonder, is turned away from the manger where the Child lies. Saint Joseph, too, is bewildered. Who can understand such an event?
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The Virgin Birth, like the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, is the most controversial article of our faith. Today, amid the multimedia avalanche, one can see videos in which learned rabbis claim that such a thing is impossible: the Lord of Lords and God of Gods, the great Almighty God, cannot become man. Deprived of the light of the supernatural grace of faith, they cannot accept that God could humble Himself by becoming incarnate. Nor are they alone. All monotheistic religions deny this. Hinduism invented sophisticated theories of the avatars of the supreme Divinity only to tell us what the heretical teaching named docetism (from the Greek dókēsis “apparition, phantom”) claims: that God can only assume a human appearance. In other words, He merely “pretends” to be human through a trick, through an illusion.
Eternal, Infallible Christian Faith
Against all these speculations, the Christian faith nevertheless confesses something truly extraordinary: that God the Son, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, became incarnate. Jesus of Nazareth is neither merely a great sage, like Buddha, Lao-Tse, or Milarepa, nor merely an “appearance” under which the divinity playfully manifested itself. No. Jesus of Nazareth is fully and truly God and fully and truly man—one single Person in whom, by a divine act, the divine nature and the human nature are united without being confused, and distinct without being divided.
Having reached this point, let us acknowledge: it was not our reason, nor the genius of philosophers or great thinkers, that offered us this teaching, but the Revelation of eternal light, which—far surpassing our capacity for understanding—sustains our minds so that, by the command of our wills set in motion by grace, we may adhere to the eternal teachings of God. This is why Saint Francis de Sales emphasized that, before divine mysteries, reason is powerless. Not even the greatest logician—Aristotle himself—would be capable, by the power of his intellect, of discovering such teachings, for they are accessible to our minds only through grace. This is why our prayer for those who do not believe, for those who doubt, is vital: by praying, we ask the Father of graces to enlighten those who dwell in darkness, or those who, for various reasons, have extinguished the light given at Baptism.
Yet in order to pray, let us look attentively at the icons of the Nativity of the Savior and allow ourselves to be permeated by the same sacred awe experienced by the Holy Virgin Mary before the divine Child. If we can scarcely imagine what it means to touch God, can we imagine what it means to carry Him, as a mother, within one’s body and—miraculously—to give birth to Him while remaining perpetually a virgin? My words cannot illuminate such mysteries, but they can invite you to meditate so as to marvel, and to marvel so as to pray—especially for those among us who wander far from the path of salvation by ignoring or even denying such eternal truths.
I quote the translation of Paul Shorey: Plato in Twelve Volumes, Volumes 5 & 6, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1969.
Thank you for your beautiful meditation. There is so much to ponder upon, and to explore the truth of - speaking as a relative igenue.
~Thank you for this beautiful essay! Merry Christmas!
ps. It looks like paragraph five is a repeat of paragraph four.